The Daily Sketch

31 August 2013

"There are 3 kinds of atrocities: benign bloodbaths - which nobody cares about; constructive bloodbaths - which are the ones we like; and nefarious bloodbaths - which are the ones the bad guys do."

"You're responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions. You're not responsible for the predictable consequences of someone else's actions. The most important thing for me and for you is to think about the consequences of your actions. What can you affect."

These are the things to keep in mind. They're not just academic exercises. We're not analysing the media on Mars or in the XVIII century or something like that. We're dealing with real human beings, who are suffering and dying, being tortured and starving because of policies we are involved in, we, as citizens of democratic societies, are directly involved in, and are responsible for, and what the media are doing is ensuring that we do not act on or responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the interests of the people suffering, not even the needs of the American people, who would be horrified if they realised that the blood that's dripping from their hands because of the way they're allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by the system

06 March 2013

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Chávez: Inside the Coup

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (a.k.a. Chavez: Inside the Coup) is a 2002 documentary about the April 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt which briefly deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

A
television crew from Ireland’s Radio Telifís Éireann happened to be
recording a documentary about Chávez during the events of April 11,
2002.
Shifting focus, they followed the events as they occurred.
During their filming, the crew recorded images of the events that contradict explanations given by Chávez opposition, the private
media, the US State Department, and then White House Press Secretary Ari
Fleischer.

21 September 2012

17 September 2012

The Inquisition is alive and well today in Spain sorry, Saudi Arabia and targets women:

"“Women living under Saudi rule must wear the abaya, or total body
cloak, and niqab, the face veil; they have limited opportunities for
schooling and careers; they are prohibited from driving vehicles; are
banned from social contact with men not relatives, and all personal
activity must be supervised including opening bank accounts, by a male
family member or "guardian." These Wahhabi rules are enforced by a
mutawiyin, or morals militia, also known as "the religious police,"
officially designated the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and
Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) who patrol Saudi cities, armed with
leather-covered sticks which they freely used against those they
considered wayward. They raid homes looking for alcohol and drugs, and
harassed non-Wahhabi Muslims as well as believers in other faiths.” "

It’s widely reported that the obscenely opulent and
morally-perhaps-not-entirely-of- the-highest-standards Saudi Royal
Family made a Faustian deal with Wahhabite leaders. The deal supposedly,
was that the Wahhabists are free to export their fanatical brand of
Islam around to the Islamic populations of the world in return for
agreeing to leave the Saudi Royals alone. There are, however, other dark and dirty spoons stirring the Wahhabite-Salafist Saudi stew.

Little known is the fact that the present form of aggressive Saudi
Wahhabism, in reality a kind of fusion between imported jihadi Salafists
from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the fundamentalist Saudi
Wahhabites. Leading Salafist members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
were introduced into the Saudi Kingdom in the 1950’s by the CIA in a
complex series of events, when Nasser cracked down on the Muslim
Brotherhood following an assassination attempt. By the 1960’s an influx
of Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia fleeing
Nasserite repression, had filled many of the leading teaching posts in
Saudi religious schools. One student there was a young well-to-do Saudi,
Osama bin Laden

During the Third Reich, Hitler Germany had supported the Muslim
Brotherhood as a weapon against the British in Egypt and elsewhere in
the Middle East. Marc Erikson describes the Nazi roots of the Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood thus:

…as Italian and German fascism sought greater stakes in the Middle
East in the 1930s and ’40s to counter British and French controlling
power, close collaboration between fascist agents and Islamist leaders
ensued. During the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of
German military intelligence, sent agents and money to support the
Palestine uprising against the British, as did Muslim Brotherhood
founder and "supreme guide" Hassan al-Banna. A key individual in the
fascist-Islamist nexus and go-between for the Nazis and al-Banna became
the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini.
After the defeat of Germany, British Intelligence moved in to take
over control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ultimately, for financial and
other reasons, the British decided to hand their assets within the
Muslim Brotherhood over to their CIA colleagues in the 1950s.

According to former US Justice Department Nazi researcher John Loftus, “during
the 1950s, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to
Saudi Arabia. Now, when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the
leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood, like Dr Abdullah Azzam, became
the teachers in the madrassas, the religious schools. And there they
combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabism."

"Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not,” Loftus continues. “They
think that Islam—the Saudi version of Islam—is typical, but it’s not.
The Wahhabi cult has been condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by
the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot
of silence. This is a very harsh cult. Wahhabism was only practised by
the Taliban and in Saudi Arabia—that’s how extreme it is. It really has
nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant
religion. It always had good relationships with the Jews for the first
thousand years of its existence."

26 May 2012

A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.
This documentary is about the foreign policy of the United States. It demonstrates the importance of the political economy, the Mafia principle, propaganda, ideology, violence and force.
It documents and explains how the policy is based on the interest of major corporations and a tiny elite to increase profits and the United States governments own interests in maintaining and expanding it’s imperialistic influence.
Inside the United States this has been made possible with a propaganda of fear for the horrible enemies like the Soviet Union, Communists and so on and a love for “free markets”, “democracy”, “freedom” and so on.
Externally (and increasingly internally) this has caused massive poverty and suffering, genocide, war, coups, crushed unions and popular movements and environmental destruction.

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About Me

"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. "

-- John Stuart Mill

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." -

--Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Lecture

"Don’t accept the habitual as a natural thing. In times of disorder, of organized confusion, of de-humanized humanity, nothing should seem natural. Nothing should seem impossible to change."